A serial killer brings terror into the community as he strikes repeatedly and seemingly at random. At the scene of each crime, he leaves behind a coded message that is designed to taunt the police officer who ended a killing spree ten years earlier, with the killer still having unfinished business. Can he be stopped this time before he completes his grisly sequence?

Also by Steve Wilson

Who Wants to Live Forever?

The Element of Death

Steve Wilson

www.CarinaUK.com

STEVE WILSON says: I’m a late-starter as far as writing goes, with my first fantasy novel started in 2000, although it did stem from an idea that I’d been mulling over for some ten years. That novel eventually became a trilogy, but my writing was sporadic during the next few years.

In 2004, I attained a Post Graduate Certificate in Creative Writing, and not long afterwards, I joined a local writing group, where I found being amongst like-minded peers of great benefit. In 2011 — after writing predominantly short stories for several years — I registered for the National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo, with the aim of writing a 50,000 word novel in thirty days, and the end result of that was my first published novel, Who Wants To Live Forever?.

I took part in NaNoWriMo again in 2012, writing a sword-and-sorcery fantasy novel set on a world with two suns, but in 2013 I went back to crime writing, which is how The Element of Death came into being. I have always enjoyed trying to solve puzzles, either in books or on screen, and I wanted to pay my own homage to writers such as Conan Doyle in this novel by devising the various coded messages that are left behind at the crime scenes.

With acknowledgements to the great crime fiction writers, especially Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Dan Brown, for providing the inspiration for this novel

This book is dedicated to my wife and children, who have always encouraged me in my writing, and to my friends and colleagues at Fylde Brighter Writers, whose support has been invaluable. I am also indebted to Victoria, Helen and Sue for their editorial assistance and advice, both of which have, in my opinion, helped make this a better novel.

Contents

Cover

Blurb

Book List

Title Page

Author Bio

Acknowledgement

Dedication

November 1st

One — Goblins and Elves

November 30th

Two — A New Partner

December 26th

Three — ’Tis the Season to be Sorry

December 27th

Four — Periodic Success

January 25th

Five — Dancing Men

February 14th

Six — Little People and Bigger Problems

March 1st

Seven — A Picture From Germany

March 17th

Eight — Angels and Demons

April 23rd

Nine — Chasing Wild Horses

April 25th

Ten — Morse and Remorse

June 29th

Eleven — A Weekend in Dortmund

September 21st

Twelve — Track and Felled

October 18th

Thirteen — All Done

Afterword — Halloween

Extract

Endpages

Copyright

November 1st

Mandy opens her front door when she returns home and screams as somebody pushes their way in after her. Then she laughs. It is one of her friends, playing a Halloween prank. Again.

“Very funny, you had me going for a moment there. Who is it? Alison? Or is it you, Joey? Still hoping I’ll change my mind, are you? Anyway, the joke’s on you — it’s after midnight now so it’s no longer Halloween.” She looks at the clock; it is four minutes after four a.m. She wonders if the ‘rule’ about midnight is right, or is she thinking of noon on April Fool’s Day instead?

The figure, covered from head to foot in light blue operating-theatre scrubs, doesn’t move. “Come on, this isn't funny any more.” She is beginning to get worried. It is one of her friends, isn’t it? He — she thinks it is a he; it must be Joey — starts to walk towards her. Now she is more than worried. She no longer believes it is a prank.

She tries to run to the door, but he is faster and cuts off her escape route. His arm is round her neck and she takes a deep breath, ready to scream for help, but as she breathes in he pushes a chloroform-doused cloth over her mouth and nose. She loses consciousness.

*

When she comes to, she is unable to move. Her arms are bound tightly behind her and thick rope bites into her ankles. She can still smell traces of the chloroform on the cloth that is now being used as a gag. She screams but no sound comes out. Then she sees him, and wishes that she had remained unconscious.

He is balancing a twelve-inch carving knife in his gloved hand. She knows that knife; it is one of hers and is sharp enough to slice a hair lengthways. She imagines he is smirking at her, but cannot see his expression behind the mask. Only his eyes are visible, and they bear down on her. Then she hears him laugh.

*

He sees the look of terror in her wide-open eyes. She is probably wondering, Why me? He wonders if she would find it as funny as he does if she knew that it was because, initially, she reminded him of somebody else. Now he looks at her closely, he no longer sees the resemblance. She is just a victim of fate, a casualty of the game that he is going to play. She never will know any of that, though. He laughs again.

He switches the television on, just in case he needs to mask any noise. The volume isn't turned up high, but is loud enough to drown out any unusual sounds. He is surprised to see that the news channel comes on; he thought that she would be more of a soap fan, or perhaps a viewer of one of the many music channels. The solemn tones of the newscaster carry across the living room.

“Police are still searching for the escaped serial killer, Morgan Gregory. It is almost a fortnight since he absconded from the secure mental health unit of the hospital in Lancashire, and in that time nobody has seen him and there are no clues as to his whereabouts.”

He laughs. That isn’t quite right, is it? I’ve seen him, and I know where he is, but then again, I would do, wouldn’t I?

“…public are reminded not to approach him but to telephone the police if they have any information as to his whereabouts. Gregory is infamous for the so-called ‘Magpie’ murders that occurred a decade ago, and if it hadn’t been for the quick thinking of a local police constable he might never have been caught. In other news …”

He doesn’t smile any more. Quick thinking? That wasn’t what was said all those years ago. Then, it was more a case of being in the right place at the right time. Or the wrong place and time, whichever way you liked to look at it. He stares at the woman again. She has heard the news, and she has made the connection. The newscaster almost seemed disappointed that there were no sightings. Perhaps it was a slow news night and they were short of anything else with which to fill the programme? Well, after tonight, there will be no shortage of stories on which to report.

He weighs the knife once more in his hand, and the woman’s eyes widen even further. If it weren’t for the gag, he imagines that everybody within thirty miles would be able to hear her screams. He can even see flecks of red appearing around the tight edges of the cloth; they are just a prelude to the coming blood-letting.

Slowly, as if to savour every last second, he takes the knife and slits open her blouse and her skirt, flicking the halves to either side to reveal her pale skin. Her chest rises and falls like an express train; his calmness is more than surpassed by her panic. Even more slowly, he begins to trace a line around her body, starting at the nape of her neck, just below the necklace that contains her initial in gold: an ornate letter M that is becoming moist with her sweat. He moves the blade lightly across the ribs on her left-hand side, scoring it over her flat stomach and down to her thighs, before returning along a similar route up the right-hand side. As careful as he is, he cannot prevent the occasional piercings, and soon droplets of blood are standing up in more than a dozen separate locations. He looks at his handiwork. The image isn't quite right.

Forcing himself to remain calm, he repeats the process, tracing a route a fraction of an inch inside the first line. He knows he has to take it slowly and carefully. Even though the previous murders occurred some years ago, he has standards to live up to. Besides, the police have to be one hundred per cent certain who it is they are dealing with. He wants them to know. He needs them to know. He doesn’t want them to waste any time looking for somebody else. That would take away all his enjoyment.

He remains dissatisfied with the shapes that he has carved, and begins again. After three more circuits, five ovals of decreasing diameter can now be seen, the angry red swellings standing out against the woman’s porcelain body. The picture isn’t perfect, but she is prepared. He takes the knife again, and this time he gently pushes the point until it is located in the loose skin between the second and third oval; with a well-practised motion, he twirls the knife handle and an inch of skin curls around the point, forming a cylindrical cone around the silver blade. Then he begins to pull.

*

It doesn’t take as long as he expects. He looks at his handiwork, and is surprised that a single body can contain so much flesh. Or so much blood. He wipes his brow inadvertently; his hand still holds the knife, and he is fortunate not to cut himself. A single hair floats down and settles on her blood-stained fingers. He makes no attempt to remove the strand. Indeed, he wants it to be found; there must be no doubt as to who they are dealing with.

But, just in case they are too stupid to see what is before their eyes, he will leave them a message. He knows how they will react; they will see his name and they will call him. It will begin, and, eventually, his vengeance will be complete.

He takes an artist’s paintbrush from his tool bag and dips it in the congealing blood before beginning to write on the walls. It is a short message, but it has to be written ever so carefully. He takes his time, checking and rechecking to ensure there are no mistakes. At last, he is satisfied. He returns the brush to the bag, then cleans the knife thoroughly and replaces it on its stand. Finally, he removes his blood-encrusted outer clothing and packs it away carefully inside the bag, which also holds two bottles. He has already used the one containing chloroform, and now he takes out the second bottle, filled with what looks like water. He removes the stopper and pours its contents, an oily, colourless liquid, all over the butchered body. A strong smell of ammonia fills the air.

Then, taking care to make sure that everything is left exactly as it should be, he leaves the flat. It is just before a quarter to five in the morning and everywhere is in silence. It has taken exactly forty minutes. He steps out into the streets and, sticking to the shadows, he heads for home.

Everything is in motion now; let it begin, he thinks as he climbs into bed.

One – Goblins and Elves

The phone rang shortly after six p.m. and I replaced my bookmark before putting my novel down on the table. I hadn’t spoken to anybody for a couple of days, so my voice was a bit throaty as I answered. “Ben Watson speaking.”

“Watson. There’s been a…it’s a bit difficult to talk about on the phone. There’s been an incident and it involves you.”

I knew straight away who the caller was: DI Jordan Creswell, my former boss; it was rare for any of those bods to call anybody from my department. There could only be one reason. “Is it anything to do with Gregory?” I asked. “He hasn’t been seen, has he?”

“Not exactly, but there’s been a murder which fits his MO and there’s something you need to see.”

“Why me? I’m back-office now, I don’t do crime scenes. Besides, I’m…not at work at the moment.”

“I know all about your situation, Watson, and I know you’re not a front-line officer any more. Normally, I’d leave you geek-guys to your computers and puzzles, but this isn’t normally. You’ve been named, specifically. There was a message, scrawled on the wall in the victim’s blood, and it was for ‘Holmes’ lapdog’. Get down here. Now.”

I shuddered. It was beginning. “Okay, I’ll get straight over. It’ll be good to get out of here. I know that might sound odd, considering what you just said, but we’ve all been expecting something like this and nothing is worse than sitting around waiting for it to happen.” I was about to put the phone down, when I added, “Hadn’t you better tell me where ‘here’ is? I know I’m a technical guru, but that doesn’t make me a mind-reader.”

He gave me the address and I jotted it down. The murder had occurred in the Sherwood district of Fulwood, one of the more select areas of Preston, and they were waiting for me to get there.

Despite the urgency, there were things I had to do before I could leave. I was a bit like Rupert Penry-Jones’ character in television’s Whitechapel, who was sometimes unable to function as a result of his neat-freak OCD tendencies. I wasn’t as bad as he was, but I couldn’t leave without tidying up. I picked up the novel I had been reading, Conan Doyle’s The Return of Sherlock Holmes, and removed the bookmark; I would have to finish The Adventure of the Dancing Men another day. I placed it on its shelf in the ceiling-high bookcase, and also put Christie’s The ABC Murders back in its correct place, in between 4:50 from Paddington and The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding. Finally, I returned The Da Vinci Code to sit alongside Brown’s other Robert Langdon novels. Then, and only then, did I set off for the car. As I headed towards it I let my mind wander over the events of the last couple of weeks; I had thought about them a lot during those fourteen days.

*

Gregory’s escape had been headline news for most of the past fortnight. The public were aghast at the fact that such a notorious serial killer could be on the loose again, and debating continued long into the night in parliament as the coalition government tried in vain to justify their policy on private security firms being given responsibility for the country’s most evil criminals.

At a local level, Lancashire was on high alert, and all police leave was cancelled while the local constabulary set about house-to-house searches in a bid to catch him before he began a new killing spree. Everybody remembered the chilling words that he uttered from the witness box during his trial: You haven’t heard the last of me. I would have been happy if I’d finished them all, but you stopped me before the final one. When I return, I will start again, and it will be a longer sequence next time. Bear that in mind, and tell Holmes’ lapdog that I’ll arrange something special, just for him.

Holmes’ lapdog. That was what he had derisively called me throughout the trial. He maintained that his capture owed nothing to good policing methods and everything to a blundering patrolman who struck lucky. The man on the beat will be a deadbeat by the time I’m through with him was one of his more printable statements.

The force took the threat seriously enough so that as soon as news of his escape hit, they despatched a patrol to keep watch on my home; in these days of cutbacks, that was a big investment to make. Even so, had Gregory headed straight for my place once he was out, by the time the patrol was authorised and mobilised it would have been too late for them to stop him.

I remembered the exact moment I heard about his escape with crystal clarity. It was October eighteenth at three-fifteen in the afternoon. It was the same day I found out what was really happening with Monika and I had been sent to ‘work’ at home following the incident at the station. But I didn’t want to think about that right now. Instead, I let my thoughts wander to the beginning, and the time that I thwarted Morgan Gregory.

*

I was a policeman on the beat in those days, and had been for several years. As I was in my late twenties, I knew I should really be advancing in my career, but I enjoyed my job, and consequently didn’t push myself forward as much as I should have done.

Much of what I did would come under the heading of community policing — something that is sadly missing now with all of the cuts that have taken place — although there were times when it could be a harrowing role. The Gregory case had put us all on edge. Nobody knew anything about him — even his name was unknown then — and that added to the air of menace surrounding the killings. He had chosen his victims according to some bizarre ritual so that each killing had a link to the old nursery rhyme. You know, One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told. His first killing had taken place at a funeral home, the next at a maternity unit.

The whole country was nervously waiting for him to strike again, even though he had confined his first six murders to the North of England. Everybody was desperately trying to convince themselves that they were safe because they had nothing to do with the final line of the rhyme, the secret never to be told; but everybody had secrets, so nobody was safe.

I was on patrol in Garstang and had been called to deal with a domestic disturbance. The woman, Beverley Evans, had thrown her boyfriend out after she had found out he had been cheating on her and the man hadn’t taken too kindly to it, hence the reason I had been sent for. I made it abundantly clear to the man that he was no longer welcome in her home, and returned to Ms Evans’ address to let her know that we had taken the appropriate action. As I was about to leave, I saw a box full of lingerie on a chair in the front room, and she saw me looking at it.

“It isn’t what you’re thinking,” she said.

“How do you know what I’m thinking?”

“I know. Believe, me, I know.”

“Enlighten me, then, Ms Evans.”

“You’re thinking, ‘Where have they come from?’ and ‘What sort of establishment is this woman running?’ Admit it.”

“I’ll admit to being curious as to what they are doing here. Since you’ve brought the subject up, what are they doing there?”

“They’re samples from work. I’m a bra specialist — I work for Seductively Secret as a demonstrator. I’ve a party tonight, that’s why I’ve all these,” she said, flinging her arms wide to show another two boxes on the other side of the room.

“Well, each to their own. I’ll say goodnight, Ms…” And then it hit me. The entire force had been puzzling over where the killer the tabloids had nicknamed The Magpie Murderer would strike next. It had been four weeks since his previous killing, and, as they had all taken place at four-weekly intervals, we expected that the final one would occur some time during that day. We just had no idea where, that was the problem. All we had to go on was that the victim would somehow be linked to a secret.

“About this party. Is it something your company organised?”

“After an invite, are you? Sorry, men aren’t allowed in. We don’t do those sorts of functions.”

“No, that isn’t it at all. This is an official enquiry.”

“Oh,” she replied, clearly taken aback. “No, this is something I’ve organised. We do freelance work as well as what the company arranges for us. This job came from…” She paused a while as she sorted through her bag, looking for her diary. “Here it is, look. Mr Pica rang me four weeks ago. He was very specific about it being tonight, and at exactly twenty past eight. I had to decide whether or not to rearrange a couple of things to accommodate. But, as you can see from the stock, he’s bringing hundreds of women along to the warehouse and I could make more money tonight than I normally do in a month, so it was an easy decision to make.”

I thought for a moment before replying. Gregory’s obsession with detail, especially as far as timings were concerned, was something that I was acutely aware of, having similar compulsions myself. Another officer might not have even noticed, but the time resonated with me. I could visualise the symmetry of the numbers, and, allied to the name of her employer, I was now convinced that I had made a key breakthrough in the case.

Ms Evans was looking at me, expecting a response to her answer, so I asked, “And does this sort of thing normally happen?”

“No, not normally. But it does on occasion, so it’s not totally unheard of. Why? Is something wrong?”

“I don’t know. Leave it with me.”

I rang the station and told the desk sergeant what had just taken place. “It was when I heard she worked for Seductively Secret that I wondered. And then, when she told me the time of the meeting, it seemed to confirm it. Do you think there’s anything in it?”

“Maybe, maybe not. What was the man’s name again?”

“Pica.”

“Peeker? Sounds like we’ve a peeping Tom on our hands, not a serial killer.”

“No, it’s not spelt like that.”

“How do you spell it, then?”

“P-I-C-A.”

“That’s a strange name… What was that? Just a minute, Eddie Parkinson is talking to me.”

Parkinson was one of the senior officers, and he was often the victim of ribaldry because of his love for birds — the feathered kind, I must add. On this occasion, his ornithological knowledge was to prove invaluable. I could vaguely hear the discussion taking place, and then the sergeant spoke to me, very slowly. “Eddie has just informed me that the scientific name for the magpie is the Pica Pica. I think you might have found our killer.”

And so it turned out. Instead of Ms Evans, an undercover police detective went to the warehouse, where she found nobody in attendance but Morgan Gregory. He wasn’t, though, expecting the back-up that broke into the building moments later, and the killer was apprehended before he could complete his ‘rhyme’ killings. Everybody was surprised when we discovered that he was a young, baby-faced, clean-cut man who was a few months short of his thirtieth birthday. He was barely older than me, and what I would have described as 'eminently suitable; if your daughter had brought him home to meet the family, most parents would have been delightedly making wedding plans.

The evidence against him was overwhelming. Gregory didn’t even deny his part in the ritualistic slaughtering, but he claimed that it wasn’t murder, as he was obeying orders from a voice only he could hear; it was a convenient defence, and experts lined up to confirm his insanity. His conviction was never in question, but instead of spending the rest of his life in a maximum-security prison — which could easily have been sixty years of incarceration — he was sent to the mental health institution that ultimately allowed his escape; the system had failed the British public once again.

As for my own career, it changed markedly after that night. Any officer might have made the connection had they been in my situation, but I liked to think my peculiar talents had come to the fore that evening. I had always been fascinated by words, numbers and patterns, and, because of the nature of the Magpie rhyme, had possibly put more thought into it than most. As soon as Beverley Evans mentioned who she worked for, my subconscious picked up on the name and made the link. Gregory might well have derided me for being lucky; I liked to think that it was good policing, hearing a seemingly innocuous word and understanding its relevance.

Buoyed by the headlines the case generated, I found myself moved away from the front line and thrust into the plain-clothes role that I had never previously considered. Only Eddie Parkinson seemed to resent my success, claiming that if it hadn’t been for his specialist knowledge, we wouldn’t have known it was Gregory. I ignored his cheap jibes, though, and threw myself into my new job with gusto, yet I didn’t forget the chance encounter that had put me in that position. I used my spare moments to research thoroughly into the Magpie Murders, to try and get into the killer’s mind in the hope that it might prepare me for my new career.

It worked, perhaps too well in one respect. I became obsessed with my attempts to understand him, to the extent that, like Gregory, I became a slave to the clock. At first, it wasn’t too much of an inconvenience, though I found myself unable to make a move into or out of a building unless the second hand had reached the sixty-second mark. Nobody else was aware of my new-found foibles, fortunately, and my work didn’t suffer to any noticeable extent.

I didn’t find my new position as easy as I had thought it would be. I had to try and get used to the fact that a detective’s life was nowhere near as precise as a beat constable’s. In my old role, I had a defined set of rules to work to, and kept meticulous notes detailing exact times, locations and actions. All of that seemed anathema now, and I began to realise that the ‘maverick’ detectives portrayed on screen were not as far from reality as I’d believed. Nevertheless, I tried my best to adapt to the expected persona of my new role, and, although I didn’t know it at the time, the Gregory incident would eventually change my life.

*

I felt as if I’d been released from captivity as I drove through the Preston streets. I’d no idea how long my ‘working’ from home would have continued, but the phone call from Creswell altered the dynamic. Now, I was on the case once more. I knew I would have to face blood and gore once again, but it still felt good to be back in action following my enforced sabbatical.

I arrived in Fulwood and parked the Jaguar in a leafy suburb close to the newspaper buildings. I wondered if the press were already onto this case. It was easy to see where the crime had taken place, as dozens of police cars were on the scene. I walked over to the Do Not Cross line, flashed my warrant card and ducked under the tape. The house was a fairly modern detached two-bedroomed affair, and looked to be in immaculate condition. I stepped onto the plush white carpets, my feet sinking a couple of inches into the deep pile. The living room was tastefully decorated and a white three-piece suite took centre stage; or, it would have done under normal circumstances. Now, though, it was heavily blood-stained, as was everything else within the room.

My immediate reaction on entering the room was to gag at the stench. “What is that?” I asked.

A PC, from the local nick, no doubt, answered. “It smells a bit like ammonia, sir.”

“Where’s it coming from?”

“It appears that the body was doused in it for some reason.”

I walked towards it, and the smell intensified. The combination of ammonia and the stink of death was overpowering. I sneezed and reached for a tissue.

“Careful, sir. You’ll contaminate the crime scene.”

“I probably already have,” I muttered, reminding him that I hadn’t been given any protective clothing to wear when I entered the building. I leant over the body, looking at all of the disfigurations. “Were these made before or after death?” I asked.

“The pathologist hasn’t said yet, sir.”

“Where’s the message? The one I’ve been called here to see.”

The officer pointed towards the far wall. I looked across, at the dried maroon lettering that stood out sharply against the bright white wall-covering; the woman really had loved that shade. The letters covered three quarters of the wall space. “That must have taken a lot of writing. Who would have thought a body could contain that much blood?” I looked at the officer, who shrugged his shoulders.

DI Creswell saw that I had arrived and he walked towards me. “How are things, Ben? Have you got over…? I mean, how are you dealing with the Monika situation?”

“Monika?” I laughed. “She’s not a problem, I assure you.”

Creswell looked relieved, and I could understand why; especially if he knew how I really felt about her.

*

Monika. I certainly wasn’t ‘over’ her, and I wasn’t dealing with the situation well at all. My time at home hadn’t helped me come to terms with what had happened; in fact, now, it was all about Monika.

I hadn’t been a detective long when our paths crossed. I was working on a joint venture with the German Bundespolizei in Düsseldorf. Our remit was to investigate a sex club that was believed to be a front for a large drug importing and exporting operation. That was where I met her. It was exactly seven years ago to the day. Just to make it clear, she, too, was working undercover, and I was assigned to work alongside her. Our first meeting, though, didn’t augur well for the future. I remembered in great detail how she sashayed in at quarter past three in the afternoon as if she owned the place. She reminded me of the oval-faced actress Naomi Archer, star of one of my favourite television shows from my youth, All Saints and Sinners, but I tried to ignore that image. I disapproved of women who willingly worked in the sex trade and didn’t want to associate the person standing in front of me with the woman I had a crush on during my teenage years.

“You can’t come in here,” I said as she tried to enter the club.

From the look of disdain on my face, she obviously knew what I was thinking.

“I’m working here,” she replied, in a voice without a trace of accent. She spoke slowly and carefully, as if she were explaining her actions to a child.

“Not today, you aren’t. The club is closed. This is official police business. I suggest you go somewhere else and do whatever it is that you do. Go on, leave, achtung,” I added, thinking that she’d probably understand more if I used her native tongue.

I expected her to go, but she just said, “Gott im Himmel, dummkopf.”

I looked startled, and she laughed, icily. “I thought that would get a reaction. You English think we all talk like that. I will not leave because I am on duty here.” She pulled out a card and held it close to my face. It read ‘Monika Ziegler, Polizeimeister’. “Satisfied? We are to work together on this case.” She flicked her head, sending her flowing blonde locks cascading over her face, but the look she threw at me indicated that she had no hope that ours would be a successful collaboration.

I tried to make up for the bad first impression I had made by buying Monika what I thought was an amusing present as a reminder of my misunderstanding during that meeting. It was a purple aluminium mini vibrator. Unfortunately, Monika failed to see the funny side of this, as she said, “I wouldn’t be seen dead with that inside me!” I realised that, instead of improving matters, I had made an awkward situation much worse.

However, despite our rocky start, the joint operation was a success. I soon saw that she was extremely proficient in her job, and I think that she found me to be a fairly competent policeman and gradually began to have a little respect for me.

The more we worked together, the more we began to understand each other, and we found that we shared common interests in music and literature. I knew that the appeal of Conan Doyle was worldwide, but I hadn’t expected Christie, with her tales of predominantly upper-class middle England, to travel so well. Monika was twenty-seven, three years younger than me, and lived in Mönchengladbach, a journey of around half an hour by rail from Düsseldorf. She had always wanted to work in England, and this case gave her the opportunity to experience, at firsthand, British policing procedures. When the case was successfully concluded, I returned to Preston, but we kept in touch and six months later she transferred to the Lancashire Constabulary, and came to live and work at what we termed ‘the station’ at Hutton.

Our working relationship extended our friendship away from the station, that friendship became a romance, and eventually we moved in together. That was six years ago. In the months and years since, a lot had happened. Being a front-line detective brought me into contact with some of the lowest of life forms. I would defy anybody to witness some of the brutalities that man inflicted on his fellow man and remain unchanged by them. Some people could get through this and come out the other side unscathed. I wasn’t some people.

My response was to immerse myself in my work, almost to the exclusion of everything else. I didn’t even notice the effect this was having on Monika, although, with hindsight, I suppose it was obvious. The more I withdrew into myself, the more my compulsions began to take over. At first, she found my little foibles endearing. I was obsessively neat and tidy. She wasn’t. She would come in from work and fling her jacket across the room, then smile while I stopped whatever I was doing to ensure it was picked up and neatly put away in the correct place. I couldn’t settle until the washing up was done; Monika would happily go out leaving a sink overflowing with pots.

She stopped smiling about my idiosyncrasies when they began to affect her life. My obsession with the clock was becoming so serious that it affected everything I did. I viewed it as therapeutic, as concentrating on the clock allowed me to temporarily prevent the gory images from overwhelming me, but I hadn’t taken into consideration the effect I would have on Monika.

What had initially been an inconvenience, as I would wait until the second hand reached sixty before doing anything, became a problem when I found I had to wait until the minute-hand also reached a five-minute mark, and then it was further extended to my only being able to enter or leave a room at quarter-hour points.

Whenever we went out, it became a major operation, and on numerous occasions we were late because I had been unable to leave until the minute hand completed its slow traverse across the clock face. It put a strain on our relationship, although I worked hard to combat my illness. Eventually, when my inability to make an instant decision almost led to a colleague’s injury, I had to admit that it was having an effect on my ability to do my job, and I applied for a transfer to a less onerous position.

Management were sympathetic and allowed me to transfer to a back-office role at constabulary HQ in Hutton, where my technical expertise came to the fore. I knew more than most about computers, and I had the type of mind that could solve logic problems that baffled many people. Working on the crime-fighting software packages seemed the natural way to go, especially as in that job my obsessive behaviour was less likely to put any other officers at risk. Away from the front-line action, I was once again able to make a valued contribution to the crime-fighting team, and I began to exert a level of control over my obsession, although I was never able to banish the images that were imprinted on my mind.

Although I kept my rank — indeed, in some aspects I was seen as important as any DI as cyber-crime was becoming one of the biggest problems for forces worldwide — Monika was less happy with the change. I had told her it would be healthy for our relationship, as to be together every day at work and every night at home, especially given the stressful nature of much of what we encountered, would have put too much strain on any couple. At least, that was my opinion.

I didn’t see how much things had deteriorated until a few weeks ago. I remember every moment clearly. It was the first day of autumn, and with the changing of the seasons came an unexpected — for me — changing in our relationship. The time was shortly after three in the afternoon and we were at home, watching the DVD of The Hobbit, but Monika seemed distracted. I paused the film and asked if anything was bothering her. It was. I wasn’t making her happy any more. The clock chimed the quarter hour, but it was as if it were sounding a death knell to our relationship. Half an hour later, Monika was leaving, her bags already packed, to ‘stay with a friend’ while she thought things through.

I resolved to become a new man, to win her back, and began to court her at work with gifts of chocolates and flowers, while giving her the time and space to ‘find herself’. I had decided to leave it exactly four weeks from the night she left, then I would ask her to move back in again. I used those days well. Monika’s leaving had an effect on me that no doctor had been able to match, and I gradually began to take control of my life again. I still had obsessions, and I supposed I always would, but I didn’t let them govern my life any more. I was looking forward to her surprised reaction when she saw that the clock no longer influenced my actions.

The day before the four weeks was up, I found out that the ‘friend’ she was staying with was Theo Atkins, one of the detectives who we had both worked alongside when I was on the front line. It was hard to put into words how I felt when I found out. I supposed if I had to describe my feelings in five words, they would be desolate, betrayed, hurt, bewildered and angry. I tried to exclude Monika from blame, reasoning that she must have been extremely vulnerable and lonely after the break-up. No, there was only one villain of this piece.

I didn’t say anything to her when I saw her at work; I didn’t say anything to Atkins. Not verbally. My fists spoke for me, Atkins was hospitalised, and I was sent home with a huge question mark dangling over my career.

I was lucky, I supposed. Morgan Gregory’s escape that same day, and the well-known threats he had made against me, changed everything. My bosses decided a course of action of ‘working from home’ would be in everybody’s best interests, and that was where I had spent much of the intervening time, catching up on my reading and spending hour upon hour thinking. I thought about Monika constantly during that period, grudgingly accepting the reason for her leaving but imagining a range of increasingly unlikely scenarios where she came back to me. It was only the thought of getting her back that kept me going through my darkest moments. Not once did I feel remorse for what I had done to Atkins; doubtless he had felt none when he stole my woman from me.

*

I snapped back to the present as I realised that Creswell was talking. “…a nasty case here, Watson. A man doesn’t want to see more than one like this in his career.” Creswell looked older than his fifty-nine years. It was hardly a surprise. For a man who was on the verge of retirement, to be faced with a serial killer on the loose for what might be his final case was tough indeed. I felt sorry for him as I saw him brush back the few remaining strands of ginger hair that made him the spitting image of the man from the Hamlet advert; it was tough on him, yes, but, unfortunately, it went with the territory. Besides, he was able to dish it out, so he had to be able to take it as well; think of the irascible editor J Jonah Jameson in the Spiderman films and you’d have a pretty good picture of the DI. His colleagues would often refer to working for him as being in a love-hate relationship without the love part.

I could see that he was waiting for me to respond, so I asked him, “Any ideas what happened?”

“Not yet, though the pathologist reckons she’s been dead for about twelve hours. Her name is — was — Mandy Norris, twenty-four years old, single and an investment banker. She was one of the high-flying set.”

“So robbery’s a likely motive, then?”

“It doesn’t look like that, but we can’t be certain yet. If it was robbery, they left plenty behind. Her purse contained several hundred pounds, and it was in plain view in her bag.”

“So I guess it does sound like him again, then. What time was she killed?”

“I wondered when you’d ask that. I take it you’re still obsessed with the clock.” His face was expressionless as he spoke, but I could detect an element of contempt in his voice. I surmised that this was probably my one and only chance to convince him that I was fully recovered. And, once he had accepted that I was no longer a liability, I was certain that the word would get around and Monika would return home. That, though, would have to wait for another day.

“The clock watcher?” I said, with a hint of a grin. “That was another person in a different life. Here, I don’t need it any more.” I took off my watch and threw it onto a chair. “I mentioned the time because it was the right question to ask. I’ll put it another way, then. Did any of the neighbours hear anything?”

Creswell smiled. “You still have that investigative streak about you, don’t you? Such a shame, such a waste. To answer your question, the woman next door said she heard a scream at around four a.m. She was annoyed, because she expected they would have stopped by that time.”

“They?”

“The trick-or-treaters. They were around in droves until almost midnight, according to the neighbour, but it had been reasonably quiet since then.”

“If that was the case, didn’t she think to report it at the time?”

“No, because she said she heard the woman laugh as well. And, as I said, there’d been screams all night with it being Halloween. There are a lot of younger people in the neighbourhood and four a.m. is still early as far as they’re concerned. If she’d reported every scream, there’d have been police here on a dozen occasions.”

“Old Hercule was right,” I muttered.

“What was that?”

“Oh, nothing. I was just thinking of a line I read recently. Something that Poirot said. To paraphrase it slightly, when do you notice an individual scream least? When it is one of a number of related screams.”

“You and your damned detective fiction! This is real life, damn it, not a story book. Somebody is dead here. It’s nothing like anything you’ve read. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sorry, sir. Of course I understand. What do we know about the victim?”

Creswell let out a deep breath before continuing. “From what we’ve been able to gather so far, she was out last night at a Halloween-themed event with some friends from work. They said the party broke up in the early hours, they all left the club, and that’s the last any of them saw of her. She didn’t turn in for work today, but they figured she’d probably had too much to drink. She wasn’t the only absentee, as a few of the girls had over-indulged themselves.”

“Who found the body?”

“Her boyfriend — he’s with the same bank. He had been to a morning meeting in London, and left for the capital yesterday early evening. He arrived back early this afternoon to find this. His alibi is rock-solid, though we don’t really need it. Not with that,” he added, pointing at the wall.

“I’d expected he would target me instead of embarking on another spree,” I said. “Not that I want some maniac to try and kill me, but at least it would stop innocents like Amanda here from getting themselves butchered.”

“Amanda? Oh, Mandy, you mean.”

“Yes, that’s right, Mandy. I guess it’s my formal logical side, imagining her entry on the police database under her full name.”

“Yes, I suppose so. Anyway, we’d hoped he would go after you — not that we want any harm to come to you, Ben. You remember what he said at his trial? He promised you a special welcome, but he also said he was going to start again, but on a longer sequence this time. You stopped him when he’d completed six of his seven self-appointed tasks. He is an obsessive. His mental state can’t allow something to remain unfinished. He has to have a perfect run. The problem is, how many will he go for next time? Ten? Twenty? A hundred?”

“Thanks,” I said, wryly. “So what you’re really saying is that if I hadn’t called it in when I found that underwear model, she would be dead, but nobody else would be in danger. That makes me feel really good about myself. Of course,” I added, “given his mental state, who’s to say that he wouldn’t have started a brand-new series anyway? Ten years is a long time. His first series lasted half a year. We could easily have had half a dozen such sprees since.”

“You misunderstood me. I didn’t mean to imply that you were in any way to blame. You were a damned good copper who used your initiative when we’d been trying to locate the potential victim for several weeks, without any success.”

“I know, it’s just me feeling a little sorry for myself. I realise that you don’t blame me for what happened tonight. The problem is, I blame me.”

“Don’t! That’s an order. I still outrank you, so put any such nonsense thoughts right out of your head. Now, about this message.”

“Thanks,” I replied, “and the best thing for me to do is try and solve this before it escalates out of control.” I looked at the congealed writing again, then walked over for a closer view. “I was right,” I said. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“I know. That’s one reason why we called you in. The other, of course…”

“Yes, I know. Because the killer has aimed it specifically at me. I know that, and, believe me, I’m not over the moon about it. I’m still a serving officer, though, so it’s my duty to respond. I accept that I’m probably the last person you want looking at this, given what nearly happened last time I was on a case.”

“No, that’s not true at all. We called you in because of your obsession with him over the past ten years. There’s nobody else — other than Gregory himself — who understands his mind as much as you do. We’re going to need to get inside his head to work out what he’s going to do next. You’re going to need to get inside his head.”

“Thanks, boss,” I muttered. I read the message:

This is for Holmes’ lapdog. He thinks he’s so clever, so if you want to try and stop the next one happening, you’d better hope he’s as good as he says he is.

I paused. “That’s the easy bit,” I said, trying to inject a small amount of levity into a sombre situation. I read the remainder, the part that didn’t make sense:

Kds’r rszqs vhsg zm dzrx nmd. Sghr hr sgd ehqrs ne lzmx. Gnv lzmx? Ad z fnakhm gdmbglzm, dke. Knnj enq Zmcx vgdm sgd mdws nmd nbbtqr.

“Any ideas?” asked Creswell.

“Not immediately.”

“Isn’t there some software you can use to crack codes like these?”

“There are plenty of applications out there, yes, but solving this depends on the code used. Some cyphers require a keyword, and without that you don’t stand a chance.”

“We’re stuffed, then.”

“No, I don’t think so. The message is clearly taunting me. There’d be no point to it if it was impossible for me to crack. Leave it with me — I’ll get home and work on my laptop to see what I can find. Can you email me a photograph of the message to make sure I don’t write it down incorrectly? The positioning of the letters might have some importance.”

*

I arrived at HQ shortly after eight a.m. the following morning. Any awkwardness that might have been felt at my return had gone; this case was far more important than petty jealousies. I was relieved to find that Atkins was still on sick leave, and, as he had never been the most popular detective at the station — only Eddie Parkinson took his side — the sympathies were well and truly with me.

Creswell was pacing nervously up and down as I arrived. “Any luck, Ben? Have you cracked it?”

I didn’t usually like it when he called me Ben instead of Watson; it usually meant he was in desperate need of help, and I lost a little respect for him each time he verbally grovelled to his team. This time, though, I understood his need.

“Yes, it was straightforward. Let’s start with an easy one—”

“There’s no need to flaunt your cleverness over the rest of us. It might be easy to you, but to us more normal mortals—”

“No, sir, you don’t understand. That’s how the message begins. ‘Let’s start with an easy one.’” I pointed to the photograph of the message from the crime scene, which was on the incident board:

Kds’r rszqs vhsg zm dzrx nmd. Sghr hr sgd ehqrs ne lzmx. Gnv lzmx? Ad z fnakhm gdmbglzm, dke. Knnj enq Zmcx vgdm sgd mdws nmd nbbtqr.

“In cryptology terms, the killer has used a Caesarian Shift cypher. In this case, it’s a simple one-letter backward displacement code, so ‘Kds’r’ is actually ‘Let’s’.”

“You’re losing me already, Watson.” Now that I had given him something, the more formal and in control Creswell returned. I knew that he probably did know what I was talking about, but he was an old-school copper who felt it didn’t suit his image to take note of all the ‘poncy university gobbledygook’ that people like me spouted.

“I know you don’t want all the details, but this really is a straightforward code. For every letter in your message, you substitute the one before it in the alphabet, so instead of writing ‘b’ you write ‘a’. Look, I’ll write the two alphabets out for you as it might make it easier.”

I wrote, on two lines:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

ZABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY

Creswell made a grunting noise as he cleared his throat. “I see that you understand what you’re talking about, but, as far as I’m concerned, the message is just a jumble of letters. How did you know he’d used that sort of code?”

“If you look at it, it’s easier than you think. You see that single ‘z’ in the message? Well, you can assume that’s a word on its own, and it will either be ‘a’ or ‘I’ — if we assume it isn’t text speak for ‘u’. Think of the alphabet as circular. As z then comes immediately before a, it makes sense to assume that the word is ‘a’ and the one-letter displacement is being used. The message then translates to: ‘Let’s start with an easy one. This is the first of many. How many? Be a goblin henchman elf. Look for Andy when the next one occurs.’”

Creswell rubbed his chin. “Who the hell’s Andy? And what does that bit about goblins and elves mean? This isn’t Lord of the Rings.”

I flinched at the name, and he gave me a strange look; he wasn’t to know that his mentioning Tolkien’s novel reminded me of the afternoon when Monika left while we were watching The Hobbit. I tried to sound calm and collected. “There’s nothing that springs to mind from the book that could explain the ‘Andy’ part. Maybe one of the actors in the film was called Andy? Andy Serkis perhaps? Even if it is supposed to be him, I really don’t know the connection.”

“If you don’t know, then I doubt it can refer to an actor. It was aimed at you, so he must expect you to be able to understand it.”

Parkinson had been standing quietly off to the side, but he began to speak animatedly to rebuff the DI’s suggestion.

“Why must he? Watson’s decoded the message, so surely the rest is up to us real detectives, He’s back office now, remember. Besides, we know Gregory was mentally unstable, so why should we expect any message he leaves to actually make sense?”

I could see the veins bulging in Creswell’s neck. He didn’t like being interrupted, and he especially didn’t like being contradicted. I could tell that it was taking all of his effort to speak calmly and clearly as he responded. “You’re wrong, Eddie. Yes, Gregory claimed to be mentally unstable, but you know as well as I do that it was all just an act for the jury. His detailed level of planning proved, to me at least, that he was eminently sane. This message was intended for Ben, so I’m certain there’s something there that he can make sense of.”

Creswell turned to face me. “About the back-office part,” he said, putting an arm around my shoulder. “We’re going to need every man we have on this case, Ben, so I want you to go back out there with the team. We’re already two down — Atkins is on long-term sick, and Monika has returned to Germany. We all thought it best, considering what had happened. So I need you to be with us. With your experience, and as you have encountered Gregory before, I want you to be my right-hand man.”

He didn’t specifically say I was to blame for the team being short-handed, but the implication was evident. I wasn’t bothered about Atkins in the slightest, but the Monika situation was different. I tried to keep my voice calm and measured. “I didn’t think she’d leave. Can’t we do anything about it?”

“No, it’s all been sorted at the top level. She’s gone back to work with her previous section for a year’s secondment. It’ll give everybody some time to come to terms with things. I know she meant a lot to you, but, like I said, it’s for the best.”

My mind was in turmoil. I hadn’t expected this. She was going to be out of my life for a whole year. I had made plans, and she was central to them all. Now they were crumbling before my eyes. “When will she be back,” I asked, trying to keep the rising panic out of my voice.

“She left the day after the incident occurred. Like I said, we all thought it was for the best, and it was all sorted with a couple of top-level phone calls. She’s due to return next October.”

I considered what that meant, and took a deep breath. “I thought that she was with Atkins. Didn’t that mean anything after all?”

The DI paused before replying. “He’s gone over there as well. Once he’s fit for active duty again, he’ll be on secondment to the Bundespolizei. We’ve owed them that ever since we poached Monika from them. He’s due to return on the same day as Monika, October seventeenth next year.”

I forced myself to relax. “I guess I didn’t realise how much I would miss her. I assumed she’d be around, and I suppose I assumed things would find their way back to how they used to be.”

“It’s time to move on. You’re how old — thirty-eight, thirty-nine? There are plenty more women out there. Forget her.”

“I’ll try, boss.” As if that were possible. “Anyway, it looks like we might have our hands full trying to catch a psychopath. Next October will be here before you know it.”

Just then, a junior officer came in. “I’ve brought the lab report on the Norris death, sir,” he said, handing a manila folder to the DI.

Creswell opened it and read the two A4 sheets thoroughly. “Not a great deal to surprise us here. DNA shows traces of the victim and her boyfriend, naturally, and also Gregory. The only surprise, I suppose, is that there isn’t much of Gregory’s DNA at the scene.”

“I see what you mean,” I said. “He isn’t making any attempt to hide the fact that he’s behind this, so why wasn’t there more to find?”

“Unless,” he added, “he was covering himself up to avoid getting soaked in her blood? He knew what was going to happen, so maybe he wore gloves, or a face mask. Whatever he wore, he took it off when he left so nobody seeing him would suspect a thing.”

I thought about what I’d heard. “Yes, I can see that. He might even have put overalls on. Whatever he used, perhaps he ditched them somewhere nearby.”

“We haven’t found anything, but I’ll order another search. Somebody might have seen some in the bins without taking notice of them.” Creswell called one of the junior officers over and gave him the new search instructions.

“What about the murder weapon? Any clues as to its whereabouts?”

“They found it. It was one of the victim’s own knives and he’d replaced it on the rack after cleaning it. There were clear traces of blood at a microscopic level, and the pattern of some of the cuts she had received matched exactly to the knife’s serrated edge.”

“I’m beginning to get an idea of his thought processes,” I said. “He isn’t trying to hide who he is, but he still isn’t going to take the risk of bringing his own knife, and then potentially being found with it? Much better to travel light. Even though he has such a high profile, he has one of those ordinary faces that means he could almost be in this room right now and we’d never spot him.”

“Not quite,” said Creswell. “I’d know him anywhere, and, I’m certain, so would you. If not,” he added, “you’d better study those pictures long and hard. If we don’t get him first, at some stage he’ll come after you.”

“Thanks. It’s a sobering thought.”

“I know, but it’s true. Don’t underestimate him just because he hasn’t tried to get you yet.” Creswell skimmed through the report once more. “There are details about the liquid that the body was covered in. It was something called hydrazine or diazane. Have you ever heard of it?”

“Can’t say that I have,” I replied. “Was that what caused the ammonia smell?”

Creswell read some more. “Seems like it. The report says it’s a colourless flammable liquid with an ammonia-like smell. It’s highly toxic and dangerously unstable unless it’s in solution. They use it in rocket fuel. Acute exposure can damage the liver and kidneys and it’s also corrosive. They say it can be a carcinogen.”

I let out a low whistle. “Rocket fuel? How could he get hold of that?”

“It isn’t just rocket fuel. It’s in some pesticides as well, and in chemicals used in photography. So I guess you could get hold of it easily enough.”

I thought for a few moments. “This doesn’t make any sense. From what you’ve said, hydrazine is pretty unpleasant, but surely that amount isn’t going to kill anybody. At least, not straight away. Why bother when he’d all but gutted her already?”

“It wasn’t used to try and kill her. The report clearly states that it was added after she was dead. They could tell by the level of seepage into her open chest cavity and the fact that there was no blood flow at the time.”

“I repeat, then. Why bother?”

“That,” said Creswell, “might be the key question.”

*

The next few weeks passed far too quickly for the investigating team, although, with Monika never far from my thoughts, time dragged for me. Despite conducting house-to-house searches across the county, there was nothing to indicate that Gregory existed. I was tasked with trying to solve the puzzle that had been left for me, but, as I repeatedly told Creswell, out of context it made no sense. He was seriously unimpressed.

Everybody called Andy on the criminal database was checked and investigated, but nothing of any significance was found. As the month drew to a close I was called into Creswell’s office. It was just after midnight, and I was about to leave for home after another frustrating evening. I was unprepared for what came next.

In contrast to the haggard appearance that had been his constant companion for the last four weeks, he looked positively relieved. “Do you know what today is, Watson?”

“No, sir. What do you mean?”

“The date. It’s the thirtieth. We’ve just ticked over to a new dawn.”

I looked at him as if he’d lost his marbles. “Yes, it is. And tomorrow will be the first.”

“You don’t get it, do you? The Norris killing took place on the night of October thirty-first, November first. That’s twenty-nine or thirty days ago now, depending which date you take. All of Gregory’s murders last time took place at four-weekly intervals. Exactly four weeks, almost to the minute. I was dreading getting a call yesterday to say he’d struck again, but he hasn’t. I think we might be all right.”

I didn’t want to disagree with my boss when he was so obviously filled with relief, but I felt I had to. “But that doesn’t make any sense. Remember the code I cracked? It told us it was the first of many. He left a cryptic message that we haven’t been able to decipher yet. He must be planning more.”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t. But what if something has happened to him? There hasn’t been a single sighting of him since the murder. What if he was the victim of a hit and run or something like that?”

“You’re grasping at straws, boss. There’d been no sign of him before the last one, but it still happened.”

“Yes, but that was only a fortnight. This has been almost a month. A month! Surely there would have been something in that time if he was still alive, if only something to taunt you — us — for our lack of progress. I can feel it in my gut, Watson. Everything is going to be okay.”

I looked at him, reading the desperate hope in his eyes, eyes that begged please let me be right, but I couldn’t find the words to reply; I knew that we hadn’t heard the last of Gregory.

November 30th

Trixie looks at her watch. It has been a slow night. Business is always bad once the cold sets in. It might be okay for those who have a nice warm bed to go to, but for her, out here by the garages on the industrial estate, finding punters hasn’t been easy.

The guy who said he’d be here doesn’t even have a car. That’s his problem, she thinks. He’s the one who’ll be exposing himself to the biting wind. She has only come here because there are far too many other women on her patch. Some of them aren’t even from the town; no, the city, she corrects herself. She detests them, coming over here and taking her business. Who do they think they are? She knows, though. They think they are younger than her, and they are right.

She takes another look at the time. Almost one in the morning. She’ll give him another five minutes, then she’ll go. She isn’t that desperate for a client. But he did promise to pay her very well. She wonders what she’ll be expected to do to get the money. She wonders, but doesn’t mind. Anything is fine, she thinks. I’ll use the cash to buy nice Christmas presents for Ciaran and Eilidh.

She hears footsteps and turns to face the direction they are approaching from. Yes, this will be him. He’s carrying a large bag in one hand and holds something under what looks like a rug with the other. What sort of kinkiness is this guy into? She smiles. The kinkier the better, as far as she’s concerned, as she runs through her fetish charge rates in her mind.

*

He doesn’t say a word as he follows her into the garage, but he makes certain that the door is firmly closed behind them. She shines a torch in his face and begins her spiel. “It’s a tenner for straight sex, anything other than that is extra. There aren’t any limits as long as you’re prepared to pay. What’s your perversion, then?”

He pulls some lengths of rope out of the bag. She smiles. “Bondage, eh? Normally that would be another twenty, but I like being tied up, so let’s call it another fifteen, eh? Money first,” she demands, holding out a dirty hand.

He lets her have it, a backhanded slap across the face that sends her flying backwards. Even though his gloves have tempered the blow a little, she is still knocked senseless. He picks up the torch that fell as she landed and shines it on her. He can see the tears welling up in her eyes and the look of disbelief on her face. What a stupid woman. In her profession, doesn’t she realise that every john could be the one who kills her? If she hasn’t before, then she will now. He shines the torch on his watch to check the time: 01:01. Perfect.

He takes the rug off the object it is concealing, and watches her eyes widen in terror as she sees what he has brought with him. Before she can react, he pounces, grabbing her scrawny left wrist, and with practised ease he secures it with the rope to the top-left corner of the huge wooden X. Then, in turn, he secures her remaining wrist and her ankles to the other three corners.

She screams repeatedly as she tries to prevent him, but she is no match for him. He doesn’t mind the noise, for there is nobody around to hear her. Besides, he is looking forward to hearing her later on.

Before that can happen, though, she has to be prepared.

He makes sure that the ropes are tight, then he hauls the cross up and leans it against the wall so she resembles a Catherine wheel on Bonfire Night. Taking out his knife, he deftly removes all of her clothing. He takes the whip from his bag. It has a wooden handle and a series of three leather thongs, each containing embedded sharp stones. He holds it in his right hand for her to see, then flails it and brings it down on her naked flesh. And again. And again.

He reaches into his bag and removes the gas cylinder. He affixes a tube to the end and then forces it through her clenched teeth. He turns on the nozzle and allows the gas to enter her mouth.

After a couple of seconds, he stops the flow and removes the tube. She shouts at him, asking why he is doing this to her, but her voice is high-pitched, as if it came from an old vinyl record that has been played at seventy-eight rpm instead of forty-five, and he laughs.

Then he reinserts the tube, turns the nozzle on and this time he doesn’t turn it off until the cylinder is empty. While he waits, he takes a brush from his bag and, holding it in his left hand, begins to cover the bristles with her blood, which appears in new locations on her body with each additional flail of the scourging whip.

*

The lifeless body of the prostitute slumps as much as it is able to, given the constraints of the ropes. He no longer notices her. All of his attention is on the message that he has painstakingly painted on the wall. The blood had dried, but the words are clearly visible.

He packs away all of his tools, makes sure that he has left nothing behind, and exits the garage, this time leaving the door open to ensure that she is found.

Two – A New Partner

Creswell was desolate. I felt sorry for him. I understood what he must be going through, and I could empathise with his reasoning when he had tried to convince himself that there wouldn’t be any more murders. Anybody could have reacted in the same way, as the fantasy was infinitely preferable to facing up to the grisly truth.

We were at the crime scene in Preston’s Deepdale district and he was constantly pacing up and down, muttering to himself. “I was so certain that it wasn’t going to happen. I allowed myself to believe it because I wanted to believe it. He’s changed to the end of the month, that’s what he’s done. One at the end of October and now the second at the end of November. I’ve already cancelled all leave for New Year’s Eve.” He took a long look at me. “I hadn’t realised how badly you were affected by crime scenes. Were you always like that?”

“No,” I said, wiping my nose on my sleeve. “Only recently. It’s the smell, I think. Or perhaps it’s just psychological?”

“Hmphh,” he exclaimed. I think any talk of psychology was beyond his capacity for understanding. He was a good detective, but limited in other areas. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have brought you here. A photograph of the message would be just as effective.”

“No, you were right to call me. There’s something about the scene that you can’t replicate in a lab. I might see — or even smell — something that could possibly help solve this whole mystery.”

“And put that bastard Gregory behind bars, where he should have been all along.”

I echoed his sentiments. “So, what is the story here, then?” I asked.

Creswell called for one of the other officers on duty, and he opened his notebook and began to read. “At half-past six this morning, Mr Benjamin Crowley was taking his dogs for a walk across the waste ground when one of them began barking intensely and ran off towards these garages. Mr Crowley followed the dog into the garage, and came upon the scene here. The woman—” he pointed at the body, which was spreadeagled immodestly “—was well known to us at the local station. She goes by the name of Trixie Lahore. Originally from Dublin, she moved to Preston twenty years ago and has been on the game ever since.”

“Trixie Lahore?” said Parkinson, laughing unsympathetically. “A bit like Ronseal, I take it? ‘Does exactly what it says on the tin.’”

“They all do it,” replied Creswell. “I suppose they think it makes them sound more exotic to the punters — a little bit of Paris in Preston.”

“Paris? Her only link with the garlic-eaters would be having French fries with her battered cod of an evening.”

“That’s as maybe, Eddie, but, like I said, she isn’t the only one. She’s had countless cautions and prosecutions, but this is just what these people do. Without their clients, they probably wouldn’t have the money for their daily fixes. It seems that this time, her luck was out.”

“It seems that she ran into our serial killer,” I interjected. “I don’t think luck had anything to do with it, though. He would have planned this. It’s an isolated spot, so he would have been able to work away undisturbed. Any idea what time it occurred?”

“We’re waiting for the pathologist’s report for specific details, but he reckons it would have taken place shortly after midnight,” answered Creswell.

“What about the way she died?”

“Again, we’re awaiting the report, but he says the flaying probably wasn’t enough to kill her. That’s all I could get him to confirm, though. We’ll have to wait till tomorrow to get the full details.”

I walked over to take a look at the message on the wall:

Pqv xgta engxgt pqy, ncrfqi, ctg aqw? Aqw fkfp’v uqnxg vjg hktuv enwg, uq cpqvjgt qpg fkgu. Ocmg uwtg aqw gplqa Ejtkuvocu, dgecwug aqw’nn dg hct vqq dwua vq egngdtcvg Pgy Agct.

“Any ideas?” asked Creswell.

“Not yet. It doesn’t look like it’s the same as last time, that’s all I can say for now.”

“You wouldn’t expect it to be, would you? He’ll try and test you to make you look useless.”

I looked at Creswell. “That’s quite perceptive of you. I was going to say that he wouldn’t know whether we’d solved the last riddle or not, as we haven’t told the press. If that were the case, he might have used the same coding convention on the assumption that we hadn’t solved it, as we weren’t here to stop this crime. But I think you’re probably right — he’s going to try and make every one different to show me up for the incompetent fool that he always claimed I was.”

“Besides,” added Creswell, a little unnecessarily in my view, “you didn’t solve the last one, did you?”

“Don’t blame me for that. I gave you the name ‘Andy’, but you couldn’t find him.”

“I wasn’t meaning that. What about the pixies? You haven’t made sense of that yet.”

“You mean a goblin and an elf, not pixies. I’m still looking at that. Email the photograph to me and I’ll get started on this one. I’ll work from home and see if I can come up with anything.” I was not in the best of moods as I left.

*

I had calmed down by the time I returned to work the next day. I understood why the DI was acting that way, as he was under intense scrutiny. The press were having a field day at how our incompetence had freed the serial killer, with some of the more right-wing nationals demanding the return of the death penalty; it wasn’t totally clear whether this just meant for people like Gregory, or if it was intended to include those it deemed responsible for his being at large.

We could deny any responsibility for his escape until the end of the world, but it wouldn’t make the slightest difference in those people’s minds. We — the department — had been judged and convicted without having an opportunity to protest our innocence. Consequently, I had sympathy for Creswell, as he was the face of the department in this crisis. I wasn’t, therefore, particularly looking forward to seeing him, as the news I had to convey wasn’t great.

As I walked into the station, the desk sergeant called me over. “Can you have a word with those two?” he asked, pointing towards the waiting area. “It’s the victim’s parents, Mr and Mrs O’Reilly.”

I looked and saw an elderly couple, probably in their late seventies, obviously trying — and failing — to come to terms with their grief. As I approached them the woman said, “Promise you’ll find whoever did this to our Beatrix, won’t you? She was a good girl. Everything she did was for her children. She didn’t deserve that. Nobody deserves that.”

“I promise I’ll find him, Mrs O’Reilly,” I said. Mr O’Reilly didn’t speak, he just nodded. I imagined that these people were of the generation that believed that the police could always be trusted to get their man. I didn’t want to disillusion them, but I expected that they would never have a satisfactory answer as to why their daughter was targeted.

I couldn’t think of anything more to say, so I asked the sergeant to take them for a cup of tea and then send a WPC to sit with them; I knew it sounded sexist, but, in my opinion, the gentler touch was what was needed at this time.

It was the people like this, the collateral damage as somebody once said, who really got to you. Even though the victim herself might not have been greatly missed by society, you tended to forget that she was still somebody’s much-loved daughter. And, as I had just learnt, somebody’s mother.

Creswell was in his office, holding a file. “Is that the lab report?” I asked. When he nodded, I added, “Does it tell us anything new?”

“Some things. There are a lot of similarities to the first case. More DNA this time, as the garage has probably been used by a lot of people like the victim.” He didn’t go into details, but I understood what he meant by ‘used’. “The report says she died from gas inhalation, not from the scourging, although she would possibly have died from her wounds eventually.”

“Oh? What sort of gas?”

“Helium.”

“Isn’t that what people use to make their voices sound funny at parties? How can that kill anybody?”

Creswell took another look at the report. “Yes, that’s right, it’s obviously a party trick gone wrong,” he said, perhaps thinking I was being facetious. “It certainly can kill somebody. I asked the same question when the report came in. The lab says the squeaky-voice part is something to do with the speed of sound being much faster in helium than in air. ‘It causes,’” he read, “‘an increase in the resonant frequency of the vocal tract and that produces the duck-like timbre.’ It is a party trick, but a dangerous one. Helium displaces the oxygen needed for respiration, and if you breathe pure helium continuously, you die of asphyxiation within minutes.”

I whistled. “You learn something new every day.” Then I thought. “So what does that tell us? Gregory seems to be killing his victims more than once. He’s using a variety of ways, some which kill instantly, and others which would eventually kill them. Why?”

“There has to be a reason, Watson. If we can find the pattern, then we might be able to get inside his mind and then we could get ahead of him for the first time.”

I hesitated before replying, as I knew he wasn’t going to like what I said. “Boss, he’s playing with us. I don’t think we can hope to understand the pattern after only two murders. If there is one, as you suspect, then I think it will be several more along the way before we have enough information to understand it.”

Creswell looked at me, an unreadable expression on his face. “Then you’d better pray to whatever God you believe in that the murders end now and we never get to understand that pattern.”

There was a short period of reflective silence before Creswell asked, “How are you getting on with that code?”

“I’ve decoded it, boss. That’s what I came in for. But you aren’t going to like it.”

“Whatever it said, I didn’t think it would be good news. Go on then, reveal.”

“He’s used a similar coding method to last time, but this one is a forward shift rather than a backwards one. And, to make it slightly different, its forward by two letters, not one, so ‘a’ would be represented by ‘c’. Here, take a look.”

Once again, I’d written the two alphabets under each other for ease of comparison:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

CDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZAB

Pqv xgta engxgt pqy, ncrfqi, ctg aqw? Aqw fkfp’v uqnxg vjg hktuv enwg, uq cpqvjgt qpg fkgu. Ocmg uwtg aqw gplqa Ejtkuvocu, dgecwug aqw’nn dg hct vqq dwua vq egngdtcvg Pgy Agct.

“So ‘dg’ is actually ‘be’. I don’t know why he did it this way — perhaps he used two letters as it’s the second murder?”

“I don’t care what the reasons were,” spat Creswell. “What is the message?”

“Sorry, boss. I latched onto it when I saw ‘aqw’nn’. It’s a good job that this guy uses punctuation. A double letter after an apostrophe made me think of common contractions, like ‘she’ll’ or ‘you’ll’. If the ‘nn’ represents ‘ll’, then that would make it two letters on from the actual letter, making the ‘aqw’ part ‘you’. It was straightforward then to reverse engineer the code.” I could see that the DI wasn’t interested in how I had cracked the code, so I decided to go straight to the end. “It says: ‘Not very clever now, lapdog, are you? You didn’t solve the first clue, so another one dies. Make sure you enjoy Christmas, because you’ll be far too busy to celebrate New Year.’”

“I told you, didn’t I?” spluttered Creswell. “He’s going to kill at the end of every month.”

“That isn’t exactly what he said, is it? It could be any time—”

“Nonsense. We all know Gregory is a man with an obsessive nature. He has to do things in a precise way. He’s shown us the pattern and he’ll stick to it.”

“Boss,” I said, trying hard to think how to phrase my request. “You know we’re really under strain here. In the circumstances, should we really be sending our senior detectives on secondment to Germany? I mean, Monika would be much more use over here with us, wouldn’t she?”

“I don’t think they’d agree with you there. There’s a resurgence of Nazism in some districts, and Monika is working undercover in Dortmund, where the situation is particularly worrying. She’s from that region, and has worked undercover before, so she’s invaluable to them. Atkins should be fit to return to duty in a couple of weeks, so I could request his return if you think we need him.”

My mind was in turmoil, and I vaguely remember saying that he was better off staying out there. I recovered sufficiently enough to ask, “How long will this undercover operation take?”

“You know as well as I do that these things take as long as necessary. It could potentially be years before they gather enough information to convict.”

“But she is coming back next October?”

“That was the plan originally. Whether she does or not depends on how the case goes.” Then he added, “I’ve told you, forget her, Ben. It’s time to move on.”

“Easier said than done,” I muttered under my breath, frantically trying to think what I could do about it. When I saw Creswell was expecting a reply, I said, “It isn’t about me. She’s a damned good detective and I think she’d be invaluable over here, working on this case.”

“I know, but it’s for the best. You know how she found your compulsiveness challenging, so…”

“That was then. I admit, I had a problem. But I’ve mastered it now, and she needs to see how I’ve changed by working with me again,” I said as I walked out of his office, slamming the door theatrically behind me.

*

Over the next few weeks, the team tried in vain to find Gregory. As Christmas approached Creswell became increasingly irritable, for he knew that the holiday season was unlikely to remain festive for long. I still hadn’t given him a solution to the goblin part of the first message, and he took his frustrations out on me, almost blaming me for the entire affair.

The public didn’t help matters at all. Hundreds of sightings of Gregory were reported, and all had to be followed up. Naturally, not a single one of them produced even the tiniest portion of a result.

To make matters worse, we also had half a dozen separate instances of people giving themselves up, claiming to be responsible for the murders, and wasting more valuable police time.

On a more chilling level, several phone calls and messages were left, purporting to be from Gregory, telling us graphically what he was going to do next. We knew that they were phony, as the callers exhibited no knowledge of the two murders so far — our news blackout, thankfully, was still working — but it meant that we had to remain aware of the possibility of having to deal with copycat killers.

It was Christmas Eve, the most unseasonal occasion that you could imagine, and I returned home after another weary day in the office. Everybody was on edge, as we all knew that we could very soon have another killing on our hands. I hadn’t been inside for five minutes when I was on the phone to Creswell. “Somebody has been in my house, boss. I’m pretty sure it was him.”

“Is he there now? Don’t try and tackle him on your own, whatever you do.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’m perfectly safe. He’s been here, but I’m sure I’m not in any danger now. I guess he wanted to let me know he hasn’t forgotten about me.”

“What has he done?”

“Nothing major. But you know how pernickety I am about the way things are — yes, I know, my OCD. Somebody — he — has been in my room and moved things.”

Creswell didn’t seem convinced, so I said, “Look, boss. I’m not your average Joe Public who calls wolf every five minutes. I’m a highly trained police officer, and part of our role is to develop that sixth sense when things aren’t right. I know that somebody has been in here, and that sixth sense tells me it was Gregory. But if you don’t want to believe me…”

“Wait a minute. I didn’t say that. I just needed to be sure, that was all. I’ll send a car round.”

*

He arrived, along with three other officers, half an hour later. “Sorry for spoiling your Christmas Eve,” I said.

“Don’t mention it. Just tell me what put you onto him, and we’ll start the checks. I’ve already despatched another car to check round the neighbourhood, and when they’ve finished here these two will begin on door-to-door questioning.” He pointed towards the two uniformed officers who had accompanied him. He didn’t refer to the third officer, a female detective of around thirty, with long black hair, tied in a ponytail. I noticed that she had sparkling blue eyes when she glanced in my direction.

As Creswell seemed disinclined to introduce her I walked over to the other two officers and explained what had made me suspicious. “I’m very particular about my books,” I said, waving an expansive hand towards the bookcase. “I have practically every crime novel that matters in there, including all the books by Conan Doyle, Christie, Dexter and Rendell. You name them, I have them. Each and every one is kept in its correct sequence. Now, take a look at that.” I pointed to the third shelf, but the two officers didn’t notice what I was referring to. “There,” I said, “in between The Dead of Jericho and The Riddle of the Third Mile. Since when has Sherlock Holmes worked alongside Inspector Morse?”

One of the officers reached out a hand to grab the copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles that I was pointing at. “Don’t touch it,” I yelled, and then, when he looked at me as if my obsession was taking over, I added, “Fingerprints.”

Once the book had been bagged away and sent to the lab to be checked, Creswell turned to me. “Sorry,” he said, “but you know how we’re struggling for bodies on this case—” I made no comment about his somewhat tasteless reference, as I figured it was completely unintentional “—so we have to make do with what we can. The plods mean well, and they have given up their Christmas voluntarily to try and help out. It puzzles me, though,” he added, “as to why you thought there was something awry. The place looks immaculate. What makes you so sure this was Gregory’s doing?”

“Instinct,” I replied. “I know those books like the back of my hand. Even an inch out of place and it would stand out to me. As for why I know it was him — it was the book. Do you remember it?”

“Vaguely, but I don’t know how that would make you think Gregory was involved.”

I couldn’t resist. “Elementary, my dear Creswell. In that book, Holmes tells Watson he has to return to London, leaving Watson to keep an eye on things at Baskerville Hall, reporting back to Holmes as to his findings. In actual fact, Holmes didn’t go back but hid out on the moors, so he could continue his investigations without interruption. Watson duly sent reports back to Holmes ‘in London’, so he acted as the perfect lapdog, in my opinion. And we all know how Gregory has referred to me over the last decade.”

Creswell nodded. “You could be right, there. That would fit his persona to a T.”

All of this time, the female detective had stood patiently behind Creswell, but now she stepped forward to look at the bookcase. “An impressive collection,” she said, in a voice with a slight Scouse accent. “And so orderly. In my place, books are everywhere. I guess that would drive you nuts, eh?”

“This is Detective Sergeant Angela Clarke,” explained Creswell. “She’s transferred to us from Liverpool — I did listen, Watson, when you told me we needed more bod— err people on this case. In light of what has happened tonight, I want you two to work together to try and solve it. She’s a firearms expert,” he added to my questioning glance. “Now, it’s Christmas Eve, but there’s nothing to celebrate. I suggest we spend the remainder of the night bringing Angela up to speed.”

*

It was after midnight when they left, and all three of us were back in the office at eight a.m. on Christmas morning. The lab boys had found Gregory’s fingerprints on the book, which they only returned to me when Creswell intervened. “He’s very particular about his possessions. We have what we need — the knowledge that Gregory was in his home. We don’t need to keep the book for evidence because we’re hardly going to charge Gregory with breaking and entering and moving books around, are we?”

There was little point in us being there, but neither did any of us think of going home. We whiled away Christmas Day playing cards, with Angela seemingly the only one who was bothered about winning. Despite Creswell’s insistence that the murderer was targeting the end of each month, I think we all suspected that, after the relative calm of today, everything was about to change.

December 26th

Catherine wipes away a tear as she leaves the graveside. Even though it has been more than twenty years since Alfred passed away, the pain still feels as raw as if it has only just happened. Christmas is always the worst time, as she finds it difficult to get by when everybody else is celebrating so much. She has nothing to celebrate; the season for her will forever be tainted by the memory of finding her husband dead in bed beside her when she woke up that Christmas morn.

She can understand the grandchildren not knowing how she feels, for they were barely born when it happened; but for her own children to so cavalierly blank it from their minds? That is what she finds hardest to forgive.

She knows exactly how Queen Victoria must have felt after the loss of her dear Albert. She mourned for the remainder of her life. Almost forty years, double her own period of grief. Catherine prays that her own suffering will not last that long.

It is quiet in the crematorium; in fact, she realises, she is the only visitor. On reflection, she doesn’t remember seeing the area this quiet before. No doubt everybody else is at home having gorged themselves to the limit yesterday. No, she is wrong. There is somebody else here. A rather smart young man carrying a bag. How nice of him to tear himself away from the pleasures of life to pay his respects to the departed, she thinks.

He seems to be waving to her, and she walks towards him to see what he wants. He is gesturing towards a line of gravestones furthest from the road. Perhaps he needs her help in deciphering the ancient lettering? Tcch, these young people. She sighs.

She decides to help, as the alternative is to return to her cold, unwelcoming flat and await the visit of her daughter’s family for the annual post-Christmas ritual. Every year she dreads it; every year she promises herself that she won’t put herself through it again; every year she says nothing and endures the ordeal. At least this time, she thinks, I’ll have spent my morning helping somebody else.

She has almost reached the man now, but when she sees him, she pauses. She cannot see his face. In fact, she cannot see any part of him. Even though it is so cold, she would have expected to see at least a modicum of skin. He carries a black bag, as a doctor would, and she watches him reach inside it.

Then, in a sudden increase in pace, he pulls his hand out and launches something large towards her. She watches, unable to move, as the rock comes straight towards her face.

*

He walks across to where the old woman has fallen. He knows he is taking something of a risk this time, as it is morning and he is out in the open. But he has figured that it will be quiet today, after the excesses that most people would have subjected their bodies to on Christmas Day, and he is right. Perhaps it will get busier as the morning wears on, but, by then, he will have completed his third task. He checks his watch to make sure of the time; it reads 08:08.

He has carefully researched his victim, watching her visit her husband’s grave on this day at the same time each week. He knew that she would come today, but he had made contingency plans anyway in the unlikely event of her not turning up; they will not be needed now.

He drags her unconscious form behind the line of gravestones. Even if anybody were to pass by, they would not be able to see him. He decides against humiliating the woman; he almost feels sympathy for her. “Tonight, you will be with your husband,” he whispers as he picks up the rock and repeatedly smashes it into her face.

He takes a brush from his bag, smears it in her fresh blood, and begins to scribe his message on the back of the nearest gravestone.

He reaches into the bag and takes out four small devices. He opens her coat and cardigan and unbuttons her blouse and places them inside, one by her left collarbone, one by her right collarbone, one over her left kidney and the final one over her right kidney. He switches all four devices on, buttons up her blouse, cardigan and coat, and departs the scene.

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